Re: The Trolling on the freebsd- lists

Well, money always tends to have a derogatory effect on open source
projects. Many OSS projects crashed and burned when money started to
flow, though a few (e.g. MySQL, Apache, Samba, Sendmail) have managed to
survive the transition.
One thing that is occuring in the FreeBSD community is that quite a
significant number of developers are doing major pieces of work within
the tree under contract. If I recall correctly, the security work and
GEOM are the two biggest contract funded projects (and not foundation
funded though perhaps someone closer to these projects can explain
the actual situation on this list). At least some of these people are
core members.
This certainly skews the political and governance structure quite
seriously. It creates responsibility and livelihood issues for
everyone involved as well as creates work compartmentalization in places
that really need more eyes on them. This in turn stratifies the
development process and greatly reduces peer review and control over
the effected subsystems. It isn't so much that outside contributions
are being ignored as it is that there are very few 'big picture'
developers left who feel any responsibility to work on things outside
their own areas of direct interest, or who are willing to ride the
gauntlet of other developers by 'intruding' in their territory with
patch sets.
Linus Torvolds, on the otherhand, has managed to keep the money away
from the Linux political core, and there is far more money involved in
Linux related projects then in FreeBSD ones. Dealing with money issues
is inevitable but when it does become an issue I hope to follow the
Linux model in that regard rather then the FreeBSD model.
-Matt
Matthew Dillon
<dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>